essays | fiction | poetry | photography | art
I fell in love with this city through your eyes
and from the back of taxi cabs.
Sadly, saw one dead cat
Cut down on pavement side
A few in lament stood over
Its lifeless body, white
Cold waters caress my feet like lovers kept apart
by chance. Foam meets flesh. Flesh kisses sand deeply,
forming wet clay against my soles. I press harder—
i am a city mad with fear
with sunshine eating up bodies in the open air
I want to scrape back the clouds
and bring morning to you on a tray,
allow you that extra hour.
In the worst of Anna’s dreams, Eric is always at his best: more alert, more alive, and more charming than she can remember.
I don’t look Chinese, I don’t speak the language besides a few words here and there, and I have never met any of my Chinese family besides my grandmother; put simply, I don’t have much Chinese cultural knowledge at all. And yet, my grandmother gave birth to my mother, and my mother gave birth to me.
I don’t remember how many years old
I am, but I do care about my birthday
Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash Debatri Das is a student studying English Literature in Kolkata, India. Her work has previously appeared in LangLit, Muse India and Esthesia Magazine. Her interests include feminism, gender constructions and how that operates within her immediate surrounding. Things they said to young girls i.…….Don’t say that you don’t like this ………Or you…
Carly Maria Hubbard earned her BA in Creative Writing from DePaul University. Her poetry has appeared in Crook & Folly, Pentimento, and Hooligan Magazine and her flash fiction in formercactus and Flash Fiction Magazine. She is an accidental one-time winner of the Uptown Poetry Slam and often suspects that the spirit of Lucille Clifton is trying to contact her. Currently, Carly is…
Freya Zhang is a young critic from Shanghai. She is currently based in London, pursuing an MA in Comparative Literature in King’s College London. After being awarded a scholarship under the State Scholarship Fund organized by China Scholarship Council in 2017, she pursued her further study in University College Cork for a semester, where she…
Photo by Tikkho Maciel on Unsplash Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a GREAT scholarship awardee, and has earned a second postgraduate degree in literature from England. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), Across The Margin, In/Words Magazine and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journaland…
Image: Pierre Bonnard – Young Woman Writing (1908) Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She writes short stories and poetry. She has been widely published in web magazines and print anthologies. She was Highly Commended in the Blue Nib Chapbook Competition [Spring 2018], won the Hedgehog Press Poetry Competition ‘Songs to Learn…
Rhi Storer is a politics graduate from the University of Birmingham, and an aspiring digital data journalist. Her academic interests include the intersection of cultural theory and data for a new radical journalism, musicology, and critical theory. She tweets @rhistorerwrites Outside of academia, she enjoys jazz, painting, poetry, and rock climbing. Don’t forget the…
James Carroll is a twenty-three year old English Literature Masters student at the University of Leeds. His work has featured in multiple Leeds art publications, including The Scribe, Heir and his mother’s fridge. He is currently writing a novel about the relationship between sport and men’s mental health, and no poem could ever mean more…
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash Damon Moore runs an arts project in Frome, Somerset. He has a particular interest in the narrative style but his short-form poetry has found a home in RAUM, The Literateur, Eyot and Forage amongst others. He is travelling somewhere in Europe at present and gathering material for ’28Articles’, a Brexit related poetry-film…
Photo by David Becker on Unsplash Kristin Garth is a Pushcart & Best of the Net nominated sonnet stalker. Her poetry has stalked magazines like Glass, Yes, Five:2:One, Former Cactus, Occulum & many more. She has four chapbooks including Shakespeare for Sociopaths (Hedgehog Poetry Press). She has another forthcoming, Puritan U (Rhythm & Bones Press March 2019). Her…
Imogen Shaw is an environmental lobbyist and final year Creative Writing MA student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including The Mays and Blueprint magazine. She is passionate about social advocacy and lives in a London flat with her fiancée and a tenacious family of mice. You can follow…
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Comfort Foods! In the academic arena, Food Studies is an incredibly rich interdisciplinary field which looks to delineate much of the things we’d like to discuss here – predominantly, the relationship between food and culture – while grounding food in its social, political and even scientific context….
Photo by Stoica Ionela on Unsplash Frances Tuoriniemi is a MA Writing student at Warwick. They particularly enjoy work that plays with colour and feels alive, work that moves and shifts to hide and expose. They have previously been published by Gravel Magazine and Tangerine Magazine. This poem was also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here….
Image: Marc Chagall, ‘The Flying Carriage’, 1913 Elden Morrow is a recent MA in Literature and Culture graduate from the University of Birmingham. He loves the poetry of Frank O’Hara and Gerard Manley Hopkins (who he wrote his dissertation on), and is particularly interested in poetry where there are abrupt shifts in tone and dialect….
Image: Oskar Kokoschka, Knight Errant – 1915 Howie Good’s latest collections are ‘I’m Not a Robot’ from Tolsun Books and ‘A Room at the Heartbreak Hotel’ from Analog Submissions Press. Can We Just Get an Algorithm to Do This for Us? A man walks onto an abandoned railroad bridge and announces, “I’m going to kill myself.”…
Image: Joan Miró, Landscape (The Hare) – 1927 Chris Di Placito is a writer living in Fife, Scotland. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming in magazines such as Litro, BULL, Ink In Thirds, STORGY and Structo. The Stork Business is slow in Big Boabby’s Burgers and ah sit alone in the furthest away booth….
Image: Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash Katy Thornton has just graduated with a First Class Honours in her MA in Creative Writing in December, and is currently working on short fiction, as well as a longer piece of work about the Magdalene Laundries in the 1980s. Her hobbies include mostly reading and writing, as well…
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash Seán Kennedy is a twenty-three-year-old writer from Ireland whose poetry has previously appeared in the online edition of Porridge, as well as in online journals Dodging the Rain, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Bangor Literary Journal. He began writing poetry in 2017 after finishing an MA in English at…
Image: Konstantin Yuon – New Planet (1921) Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, The Adventure and Happiness (Story Line Press), and two collections, A Poverty of Words (Prolific Press, 2015) and Landscape with Mutant (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Many of his other poems have appeared in print and online journals. Question…
Dan Morey is a freelance writer in Pennsylvania. He’s worked as a book critic, nightlife columnist, travel correspondent and outdoor journalist. His writing has appeared in Hobart, decomP, McSweeney’s Quarterly and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find him at danmorey.weebly.com. Sexism in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard A conversation is needed. A freewheeling debate. So I…
Image: Henri Matisse, 1907, Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra) D. M. Kerr is the writing name of a Canadian writer currently living and working in Singapore, where he teaches game design and business. His work has been published recently in Founders Favourites, in the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library’s So It Goes magazine and in Page and…
Image: A Star Shell – Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, 1916 Malcolm St Hill lives in Newcastle, Australia and is a poet, reviewer and independent researcher focused on the literary memory of the Great War, particularly the work of Australian soldier-poets. Frederic Manning and the Greatest War Novel of all Time The Australian poet and…
Image: Richard Westall – The Artist’s Wife as Sappho Kaylie Saidin lives in New Orleans, where she studies English literature and is an editor at the Maroon. She was the winner of the 2018 Dawson Gaillard Award for Fiction and the 2018 Monroe Library Research Competition. Her work is published or is forthcoming in The…
Image: Alice Bailly – Self Portrait (1917) Jamie Stedmond is a young Irish writer, currently based in Dublin. Jamie is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Previously published or forthcoming in The Bohemyth, Dodging the Rain, The Cabinet of Heed, Cold Coffee Stand, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Crossways Literary Magazine, Cagibi, ZeroFlash,…
Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, NY. He has worked as an architect in New York City and Charlottesville, VA. His short stories and essays appear in Bangalore Review, Fiction International, The Fiction Pool, Litro, London Journal of Fiction, New Haven Review, Short Fiction. Where I Lived As the Great Recession brought construction to a standstill…
Image: Andre Derain – Charing Cross Bridge (1906) DS Maolalai is a poet from Ireland who has been writing and publishing poetry for almost 10 years. His first collection, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden, was published in 2016 by the Encircle Press, and he has a second collection forthcoming from Turas Press in 2019. He has…
Image: Faye Goodwin (1931-2005) Ian C Smith’s work has appeared in, Amsterdam Quarterly, Antipodes, Australian Poetry Journal, Critical Survey, Live Encounters, The Stony Thursday Book, and Two-Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island, Tasmania. Police informer’s last rites He imagined eyes…
Nora Selmani is a writer and poet based in London, an MA student in Comparative Literature at Kings College London and an Arts & Humanities editor at Porridge. We caught up with Nora to find out more about her first collection of poetry, Portraits, which has recently been released by the Cardiff-based publisher Lumin. In Portraits,…
Chris Rouse is Porridge‘s Non-Fiction Editor. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, researching representations of East Asia in medieval European maps and travel literature. He has a keen interest in interdisciplinarity, global history and the history of ideas and ideologies. In his spare time he can often be found in old churches making bad…
Nathalie Tierce was born in New York City and studied illustration at the High School of Art and Design and went on to receive a BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. After graduating she worked extensively as a scenic artist in England painting backings for film and The BBC she settled in Los Angeles. This…
Image: Lee Krasner – The Seasons (1957) Charley Barnes is a Worcester-based poet and author who has recently gained her Doctorate degree in Creative Writing and now spends her days wondering what to do with it. Charley’s debut short story collection, The Women You Were Warned About, was published in May 2017, and her debut…
This essay by Robert Boucheron is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, New York. He has worked as an architect in New York City and since 1987 in Charlottesville, Virginia. His short stories and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Fiction International, London Journal…
